Hello, My Little Chickadees--From Salt Lake City

Yikes, what a lot of driving! I mean, a LOT. Thank god I wasn't the one doing it, right? We were on the road forfuckingever yesterday--from Albuquerque up through Colorado through Cortez (lived there) over to Utah, through Moab (lived there) and Price (lived there) and on up to Salt Lake City. Haven't ever lived here. I don't even know if I've ever BEEN here. It's weird, you know: used to I could just call one of my parents for stuff like this. Now there's nobody who knows it. And since I sure as hell can't remember it, it's lost forever.

Like that's a big deal. Nope.

Here's a photo of us standing at the Continental Divide. I had no idea about the water. Did you? Probably everybody on the planet knew that but me.

A woman got out of her SUV, which was filled with other people, and offered to take the photo. People are amazingly nice.

These are in Moab, Utah. Every lamppost along this road had these rock sculptures hanging from them, and I LOVE those. I wanted to take them all with me.

Nothing really to report here. Days of stitching in the truck and listening to CD's of Molly Ivins bashing W are a great way to spend time, but they don't much lend themselves to entertaining stories. Oh, sure, I got us ever-so-briefly lost yesterday, failing to make the non-turn in Shiprock that screwed us up and had us heading toward Farmington, waiting patiently for the highway to turn north and having it just keep on not happening. I think it was Fate, trying to force us to go to Farmington, as I'd earlier said to The EGE, "Gee, if we just went over to Farmington, we could go through four places I used to live today." So there was much bitching about the wrong turn. That would be by me, as The EGE doesn't care about stuff like that. Wrong turn? No problem: go back and take the right turn. Wanna see the Two-Headed Rattlesnake? Sure, let's turn around and go back.

Me? Holy crap. I HATE it when I make A Navigating Mistake. Drives me fucking NUTS. See, I firmly believe (although My Adoring Husband thinks this is just the teeny, tiniest bit totally wacko on my part, not that he ever says anything right out loud, like, "Jesus, do you think you could lean back and take a breath before I'm forced to crash us into the side of this mountain just to shut you up?" No. Not The EGE. He just looks at me the way people do when you say, "Wow, man, 'soup,' what a great concept! Can you believe it?")--ANYWAY--what I believe is that we've made a Pact. As in A Contract: he's agreed to drive us everywhere and not screw up (because, well, "screwing up while driving" pretty much = death and destruction), and I've agreed to make all the arrangements and get us there without getting us lost or wasting time or never, ever, EVER not knowing exactly where we are every second along the way.

Have I ever mentioned to y'all that I love maps? As in, reallyreallyreally love them? Oh, yeah, baby: I LOVE maps. Like, without even checking, and with my horrible memory, I can tell you that, to get here last night from the interstate, we took Exit 308 west, and then Exit 115 from that. I LOVE exit numbers. I can tell you at any time which direction we're driving and the name of the next town that's coming up. I'm about maps like most people are about their iPhones/Blackberries. I don't leave home without them. I favor the Rand McNally ones that show the rest areas and have all the exit numbers clearly marked, but sometimes I have to make do. Right this minute, the Atlas and Idaho and Utah are spread out on the bed. The trick for me is to look at them and get most of it in my head so that, periodically throughout the day, I can casually say things like, "Over to your left is Big Bald Mountain, which is a little over 10,000 feet."

He's not fooled, but he pretends to be impressed. No, scratch that: he IS impressed. He's impressed as hell that I remembered anything since breakfast.

Well, I could go on, but typing on this laptop just drives me crazy. I have the plugged-in keyboard, but it's a little different, too, and I can't access my Windows Live Writer account to set that up, so the whole photo thang is a pain in the butt, too.

So I'll go brush my teeth (and aren't you glad?) and get ready to get us to Boise. Well, not Boise, actually: Caldwell, which appears to be a suburb. Then, tomorrow, on to Portland.

Hope y'all are all having fun, doing exciting stuff and never getting lost along the way. Unless, of course, you actually LIKE getting lost.

Shudder.